End of year review

Join us as our Editor-in-Chief Andy Hargreaves and Publisher Sharon Parkinson take a look back at our first year and ahead to what's on the horizon for 2017…

What have been the highlights of JPCC's first year?

Looking back over our first year, we've had a terrific range of articles from some of the leading scholars in the field and from emerging scholars too. It's great to see how the research has been ideologically, methodologically and internationally diverse.

Emerald Publishing has supported the journal with some exciting and innovative formats, including videos, infographics and cartoon abstracts as ways of highlighting the articles. The journal Editorial Advisory Board has also been very actively engaged in support of the journal throughout the year.

Have any articles from Volume 1 made an impact in the field of Education, school leadership and teaching?

Santiago Rincón-Gallardo and Michael Fullan's article, "Essential features of effective networks in education" from issue 1 is attracting a lot of attention in the field on how to think about professional networks and what characteristics distinguish effective from less effective ones.

Which emerging trends would you be interested in publishing articles on in volume 2?

We are working on putting together a special issue on the collective impact of different partners inside and outside of the school working together to address poverty and disadvantage. There is a lot of debate at the moment as to whether collaboration and professional communities are a good idea, but also on the different ways in which educators can and do collaborate.

Many countries are now trying to develop accountability systems that combine good data with good judgement, but we know less about the nature of good judgment than we do about good data. This is another area we hope to explore.

What are your top 5 predictions for changes in the Education field in 2017?

There is currently a growing division of and battle between two narratives of change on the world stage: one driven by markets, choice and disinvestment in public systems; and the other driven by a search for social cohesion through a more robust public sector.

There is a huge concern with wellbeing, anti-bullying, working with refugees, countering racial violence - how to conceptualize it, measure it, and rethink the nature of teaching in relation to it.

An emerging topic I expect to see more research on in the wake of the 2016 elections in Europe and the United States is poverty among and education of the white working class in explicit, not just implicit terms.

Teacher professional learning and development will take more prominence compared to teacher preparation. As more teachers enter teaching via non-traditional routes, the issue of how we develop who we can get will take precedence over how we prepare people in the first place.

The boldest change to come is that 2017 will see the beginning of western systems withdrawing from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and creating an opt-out movement in its place. PISA started out as a good way of sampling the existing system - but it's now apparent that schools can and do teach to the test, and systems manipulate their samples to get better results. Every test like this should probably stop after about 4 cycles just when people have become too good at ‘gaming the system'.

It's been a fantastic first year for the Journal of Professional Capital and Community, and I'd like to wish all of our readers a very happy 2017!